Debian Weekly News - May 23rd, 2002

Welcome to this year's twentyfirst issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. We're sorry to be late, but Joey's involvement at LinuxTag organisation kept him from
preparing DWN in time. This is likely to continue until beginning of June.
Of course, this week included a mail
asking when Woody will be ready. Short answer: There is still work to do
before we can release.

Is MPlayer Ready For Debian Packaging? With the recently
released version 0.90pre2 of MPlayer, some important improvements to the
source were announced. The
package now entirely consists of 100 % GPL code and also contains runtime CPU
detection code. This means that any x86 MPlayer binary can run on any other
x86 CPU. Compile-time detection of the target CPU is not required anymore. A
third interesting improvement refers to the support for more file formats,
including the new and very popular Ogg format.

License Problem with new Nessus Package. Josip Rodin explains
that he cannot release new Nessus packages because the upstream decided to
switch to using OpenSSL, which is linked against GPLed code. Later Simon Law
tried to
reach upstream.

Missing Build-Depends. Junichi Uekawa released a list of
packages that do not have a Build-Depends line but depend on other things than
build-essential. The list is intended as a helpful approximation.
Considering that there is only about 300 of them, which is making less than
10% of the Debian distribution, we might be quite close to having a useful
Build-Depends setup. Thanks for all the people who've made this possible!

Packaging Fortunes. Aurelien Jarno pondered
about the legal status for collections of fortune cookies. He was told that
each fortune itself is a quotation, and it this legal to include it, as long
as it is no longer than 4 lines, which is believed to constitute "fair use".
However, the source package itself, which includes all the fortune cookies,
needs a copyright from the person who has compiled it.

Flamewar of the Week. Nils Rennebarth wondered if
long delays with regard to new packages are due to the upcoming woody release.
Even with this rather not-flaming question, Jeroen Dekkers turned it
into a "Debian is so anti-Hurd" flamewar. With more than 300 mails in this
thread, it cannot be ignored. However, contributing to it doesn't make much
sense, since it became a real huge flamefest.

GCC 3.1 for Debian? The GNU Compiler Collection 3.1 was released recently and severalmailsindicate that
the GCC maintainers are already workingtowards
packages for all architectures. The package doesn't bootstrap properly on the
m68k and powerpc architecture, unfortunately. Preliminary packages, including
binary packages for the intel x86 architecture, are here.

Restructuring Webmin. Jaldhar Vyas announced
his plans to restructure webmin packages. It is a framework for web-based
system administration tools written in Perl. It's released by the upstream
developer as one big tarball. The framework and most of these modules are
already packaged as part of the webmin source package but Jaldhar wants to
split it up into separate source packages.

CVS Directories in Binary Packages? Joey Hess noticed
that about 50 binary packages in unstable contain CVS files (like
Entries, Root and Repository). He
wondered if anyone could think of a reason for a Debian binary package to
include it.

Debian Used for Setting a Record. The Internet2 consortium recently announced a new intercontinental Internet performance record. It
was set by transferring the equivalent of an entire compact disc's
contents across more than 7608 miles (12,272 km) of network in 13
seconds. Desktop computers running the Debian system were used on
both ends of the pipe. With an Internet connection of this size
transferring all six CDs of Woody from Fairbanks to Amsterdam would
only require 78 seconds.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were
added to the Debian archive recently or contain important updates.

Seen something interesting? Please drop us a note whenever you
see something noteworthy that you think is appropriate for inclusion in DWN. We
don't see everything, unfortunately, and this month will be a busy one for us.
Of course, we are also thankful for completely written items from volunteer
writers. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.